Local had stake in Czech Republic’s Velvet Revolution

The suicide pact among several young idealists would prove little more than an unsung formality. Jan Palach was the first to go, setting himself aflame in Prague’s Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969 to protest communist oppression, specifically the Soviet-led tanks that infamously rolled onto city streets the year before. Only two likeminded friends followed his lead amid his warnings of the pain they faced.

Palach, a 21-year-old history student at Prague’s Charles University, died in agony three days later.

Marketa Hancova, a Czech native and 10-year Point Loma resident, was only a little girl then, and the upshot from Palach’s death wouldn’t take root in her for several years. But as rarely before in modern history, the past was prologue — and two decades later, Hancova found herself in the middle of the Czech Republic’s Velvet Revolution (”Sametová Revoluce”), perhaps the most dramatic of the insurgencies to befall a beleaguered Soviet leadership.

The old Czechoslovakia, after all, hadn’t held parliamentary elections since 1946, two years before the communists took power. Now, in the autumn of 1989, communist secretary Alexander Dubcek, whose advances toward reform brought that wave of tanks to bear, would stand on a Wenceslas Square balcony before scores of thousands of delirious demonstrators, throwing his arms around himself as if to embrace the crowd, a chasmic grin threatening to split his face.

“Dubcek na hrad! Dubcek na hrad!” (Dubcek to the castle!”) the throng shouted itself hoarse. Prague Castle is the locale of the Czech president’s offices.

“I think this was the most important moment of my life,” Hancova said, “except for the birth of my children. This was so very important, because the revolution didn’t have any heroes.

Ninety-two percent (of the republic’s 12 million population) participated in the demonstrations. That’s amazing. Ninety-two percent.”

But that’s what began to unfold 20 years ago on Tuesday, Nov. 17, as Prague riot police beat crowds commemorating International Students Day. In response, up to a half-million protesters (Hancova among them) took to the streets three days later, throwing flowers at casehardened troops. A general strike would follow on Nov. 27; the next day, the communists agreed to relinquish power.

Acclaimed dissident playwright Václav Havel, who himself spent five years in communist-run jails, was named Czechoslovak president Dec. 29. In 1990, the nation held free elections for the first time in more than 40 years. Havel was elected president of the fledgling Czech Republic in 1993 and again in 1998.

Such a far piece for a cute little 10-year-old from Breclav, who’d stood transfixed with her friends at all things Western, like the latest jeans and music and even bubblegum wrappers, reverently smoothed and pressed between the pages of the most unworthy personal journals.

“Anything from the West,” Hancova said, “we would be, like, ‘Ohhhh, my God!’ It’s just amazing, when I look back now and think about it. You don’t feel the oppression then. You just wonder, ‘How are they so lucky?’ Green and yellow and red wrappers! So precious! My God!”

But wonderment would give way to curiosity, and curiosity would beget disenchantment. The communist system was taking its toll throughout the old Eastern Europe, and the Soviets knew it.

“Russian communism never worked very well anyway,” communist General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev would later say. “The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.”

How right he was. And Hancova has proof. She leans across a table at at least 50 degrees, eyes flashing and fingers stabbing the air amid impassioned staccato speech. The immigrant’s refined bearing is gone in an instant, a true patriot’s fervor quickly taking its place.

“We had dignity,” Hancova said, “because the communists didn’t mess with the education system. They kept the education system that was the same since medieval times. We had learning in the exact science[s] and the humanities. We had languages. We had art. We had music. History was the only subject they rewrote to their liking.

“But intelligence was the biggest enemy of the system. Why? Because if you are sophisticated and educated, you see right through them. You can manipulate them. Education was really a tool that worked against them.”

Hancova’s parents’ liberal views raised a red flag (pun intended) among the communists; as a result, Hancova was an unlikely candidate for university admission. “I was lucky,” she explained, “that I had nothing to lose. I go right to Prague and kept bugging the minister of education for two years. Finally, they just said, ‘OK, you can become a teacher.’

“That’s so ironic,” she laughed. “If I were so dangerous for the society, how come you’re letting me study to be a teacher?”

A hankering for Beat Generation idealism and several master’s-level courses at Charles University yielded an ideal occupation years later - dean of education at San Diego’s Platt College graphic design and animation school. Hancova spearheads regular cultural field trips downtown to inspire her students in their creations.

Education, it seems, comes in many forms. Including bloodshed.

“Every revolution,” Hancova said of Palach’s memory, “is a revolution of death, because that’s usually the only way you can achieve it.”

And while it’s true the Velvet Revolution transpired without a shot, its genesis lay in the discontent of another cold January day. A hopeful young history student would meet the beginning of the end in Wenceslas Square, where a tired old man’s simple gesture from a balcony would follow in the blink of an eye.

Tags: Alexander Dubcek, Beat Generation, Czech Republic's Velvet Revolution, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, International Students Day, Jan Palach, Marketa Hancova, Platt College, Prague's Charles University, Prague's Wenceslas Square, Sametová Revoluce, SDNN, Václav Havel

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